Recent updates in Google Search clearly point to a radical shift in how users interact with search results—a shift that will have direct implications for the volume of traffic reaching websites. With the expansion of AI Overviews and their direct integration with AI Mode, users are increasingly engaging within Google’s own ecosystem instead of clicking through to external sites.
Asking a follow-up question within AI Overviews now takes users directly into AI Mode without returning to traditional search results. This change is designed to make the search experience feel more like a continuous conversation, where the context of previous questions and answers is preserved, giving users a smoother and more interactive experience within search.
Google says this direction is based on tests showing that users prefer a search experience that naturally flows into a conversation, especially when asking multiple related questions on the same topic. From Google’s perspective, integrating AI Overviews with AI Mode makes search more useful for users.
In practice, when users tap “show more,” AI Mode opens directly on top of the search results page, with the option to return to results via a close button. However, in this new interface, links and sources disappear entirely, which clearly reduces opportunities for clicks to websites and publishers. So far, this change is available only on mobile devices.
At the same time, Google announced the adoption of Gemini 3 as the default model powering AI Overviews globally. This model is now used to generate AI-driven responses within search results, with the goal of improving the quality of direct answers users receive without needing to visit other websites. This differs from the previous rollout, which tied Gemini 3 Pro to complex queries only and to limited subscription tiers.
The significance of this update is not just about improving answer quality, but about its direct impact on traffic. As users move from search results into AI Mode instead of visiting websites, a decline in clicks is expected—especially since AI Overviews already appear at the top of search results. With this new development, competition for traffic from Google Search becomes even tougher, as Google increasingly encourages users to stay within its intelligent environment rather than navigating to publishers’ and content creators’ sites.